


Brightness

by bladeCleaner



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ambiguity, F/F, Gen, Partial Nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:21:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6548578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bladeCleaner/pseuds/bladeCleaner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two terrible girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brightness

**Author's Note:**

> > START NEW GAME?  
> (Warning: wall o' text, very sappy, pt1)
> 
> I still don't know how to properly articulate this, you know? Does anyone, truly? So many of us are gone. So many of us are still here. All of us - single parents, college and high school students, middle-aged refugees, teachers, teenagers, everyone you could possibly imagine - we jumped in feet first and head spinning into this ridiculous, joke-riddled, memetastic, unbelievably ambitious bundle of creation myths. From the mysterious depths of 4chan and Gaia Online forums to this. The end of an era, because say what you will about this fandom but it left an indescribable mark on anything web-based/comic-based that would come during and after. We cried, we shipped, we fought, we theorized, we drew and wrote and roped in our friends. We used Skype and Pesterchum, religiously refreshed web pages in libraries, airports, checkout lines. 
> 
> I was a Problem Sleuth fan that joined up sometime in 2008, before Homestuck began. I was there at the first page, and got bored and left sometime in Act 4. In late 2011 someone posted about [S] Cascade and I was lost all over again. like finding a spark and leaving halfway through making the fire and then coming back and seeing Hell-a blaze of glory in all the edits and manips and AUs and fanventures one could want. I spent 2012 entrenched in Homestuck as I uprooted myself 3000 miles from my home city. I met some wonderful people, who I'll name here, Ash, Max, Lanta, so many people who I've lost touch with but I see their projects online still, and I wish them all the best. We were so mad those years, with HSO, late nights rereading Hemostuck, The Vienna Game, Promstuck, The Serendipity Gospels, Red Dead Virgo, YELLING about Strider's Edge, furiously theorizing about Dirk and Roxy's real names, the whole works. During the huge hiatuses, the statisticians of our fandom would be flocked to, trying to estimate the next update date. I trawled the TV Tropes Homestuck Fanfic Recommendations page (my name's still there) and I wrote like a demon. There was the Vex drama, the CAUCASIAN drama, the unbelievable deluge of JohnDave fics that were parodied. There were even parodies of THOSE parodies. There was March Eridan and John: i'm not gay! drama. Fighting against Superwholocks trying to invade "our fandom". The never-ending question: is Kanaya Gay or Alternian? Dangan Ronpa and OFF being co-opted into the fandoms, Hetalia, Narutostuck, Ke$hastuck, reading someone's fic and then realizing it's the person you talked to about headcanons in the chat one time because at the time fandom was still pretty small, finding all of them later in the same fandoms you've joined up in the hiatus, I could go on and on and on and on...(we didn't start the Homestuck)

When you walk in through the door, she's halfway through shucking her clothes, her torso drenched.

“Another campaign with sourplum Ampora!” She says, briefly, as she hears-or smells?-you approach. Her hair is the longest it’s been for a while since you cut it. She’s clouded in an aroma of brine and moss.

“You look like a hoofbeast in the Ship In Which Several People Die Horrendously And Musicians Continue To Play Their Instruments In A Comedic Ceremony Of Their Own Deaths,” you say easily. “I will assist in your hygiene, for I doubt your lusus gave many lectures on cleaning.”

She shrugs and sheds her red shirt and teal blouse. She still doesn’t take off the sunglasses, even as there’s saltwater dripping on her treehouse floor. Her back is an expanse of wet greyness, ridges of her shoulders bordering green. You take a fabric patch from her ablution block and begin to work on her. There’s blood pasted all over her bare skin and you ask, “How did you manage to get blood on your body and not on your accoutrements?”

She doesn’t answer.

You sigh. “Your hesitation to discuss quadrants with her is causing all of us quite some stress, Terezi.”

Her muscles tense. “Yourself in particular, I presume, Miss Mint Julep?”

Your hands are in the middle of wiping away the panoply of color right in between her shoulder blades when you freeze at that. “We are merely pale,” you say, mouth gash dry. “I do not think you are attempting a pale solicitation, given your wounds.”

“We flip all four like one of her stupid dice!” She says. “I am not remiss in my attention span to know that. And neither are you, slumberjack.”

“She seems to want you in her black square,” you reply, tone carefully measured. “Pale would require a tenderness and care I doubt either of you can manage.”

She screeches. By that you mean she laughs but it sounds more like a lusus' claws on glass windows. “True! Very true. We’re as explosive as one of her stupid doomsday devices. I think that is why she continues this game.”

There’s the sound of dripping water for a while as you clean her up enough so that she can take a shower in her ablution block without her bathing receptacle being blocked up for sweeps. The short pause she gives you is brief but tense.

You want her to say something. Dancing around this for-one of you is waiting for the other to say, “We can’t keep doing this,” or, “We need to talk,” but both of you are stubborn. Terezi is. You are just…perhaps, a little too proud, but you’d never admit it.  
You finish sponging her off to find a big scar-a teal tilde-on her back when all the blood’s been washed away. It looks a few days old and almost stretches from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. You almost touch it with your claw and think better of it.

She turns around unceremoniously and her half-nakedness doesn’t stun you at all. That’s what frightens you; looking at her bare skin is as natural as breathing. It’s easy.

You have absolutely no idea what you two are about, at all.

She slings her arms around your neck, dragging the scent of the sea around your collarbones, locking her fingers just at the back of your hair where it stops.

“The law thanks you for your contribution to societal hygiene, jadeblood,” she says, slinking a wicked grin at you. “Now, I don’t have any money, so I guess I’ll have to pay you…in other ways.”

You push her nose away from your face with a slightly amused huff. “You have been consuming too much amateur erotic filmography. I thought I told Sollux to change his password-”

She walks unabashedly, chest still jiggling slightly, into your absolution block as she replies. “Please! All his passwords are full of i’s and 2’s. Easy peasy.”

“I highly doubt one of his caliber would-”

She snickers. “Yeah, yeah, I got it out of him. Easiest case.”

You giggle despite yourself and sit down in one of her chairs relatively uncovered with chalk dust, survey where you are; you forgot what an almighty vibrant mess Terezi’s room is, even brighter than yours. It’s past sunset, and the evening is just settling in the corners of the room – cool breeze and faint blueness filling in the gaps of her treehouse. The last bits of light coalescing on the dragon scales, making the room shimmer with phosphorescence. You feel as if you’re plunged under the Alternian sea, even as you hear the leaves rustle outside. _Shhhhhhshhhhshhhhh_.

The sound of running water; the glow of night. You close your eyes.

\--

The cue ball, the frog, the sun shining down on you. **Thanks For Playing**.

Rose’s hand, still a revelation after three years, in yours. The sun on your skin.

You visit her, the fourth night, after Dave and John and Vriska and Karkat are done, and you see Vriska, passed out, by the foot of the bed. Terezi’s lying there, her red sash gone, an expression on her face that would make you twinge if you didn’t have Karkat.

(CG: GO GET SOME CLOSURE ASSHOLE  
CG: WE FINALLY HAVE SOME TIME TO OURSELVES  
CG: FUCK KNOWS YOU EARNED IT)

“Delicious sage sylph,” she says, “have you come to disturb my slumber?”

“I have,” you say.

Vriska and Karkat, strings holding you all so close, and you want to say: thank you. Or; sorry. Or; you are the brightest thing that never happened to me. You draw closer, to the other side of the bed. You can hear Vriska snoring.

You say, “My name is Kanaya Maryam.”

She clicks instantly. “My name is Terezi Pyrope.”

“The world has ended. The world is here.”

She cackles. “What will you do?”

**Author's Note:**

> (pt 2) Just- Homestuck, in general, who were there when I was getting through college in a country I'd never known, who saved my life with the people I met through it, who introduced me to queerness in a way that I could understand. Homestuck that took all of us, many of us acne-ridden teenagers, a lot of us very terrible, all us misfits in one way or another. 
> 
> In some ways, Homestuck was a piece about long-distance relationships and how it could and does work. All my friends were in different time zones. I'd wake up, sweating to the smouldering humid air of a place where summer never dies, and it'd be night somewhere else and people saying I'm downing Faygo with wine, the chat poppin and I'd rub my eyes and ask, what I'd miss? I caught on to updates from a San Francisco airport to a tiny apartment in a small town in China, constantly moving, all of us asking, what time is it there. Where are you? It doesn't matter but we want to know, and come join us, let's scrutinize this one panel together!
> 
> This is all supersappy, weird, but it's been five years (or, in some ways for me, EIGHT YEARS) and even though we'll all probably never get to the end of this ride (epilogue, Hiveswap, Hiveswap /DLC/, Andrew's gonna have to die before we leave this bar) this still feels almightily significant. So many of us in the fandom owe Homestuck so many things; got us through college, or rough times, or through the realization that oh shit, I'm queer, ooooohhh shit. Even if some of it was terrible and fucked up- I'll always be proud to be part of this. To have been a part of this, even in a small way - modding Jadefest with lanta and ash - to pinch hit and read and rec and to have known all of you. I feel like there's really not enough words, and this is already too long and self-indulgent, but man. This meant so much to me in a time where I felt so lost, and it's forever shaped so much that came after, and not just me, or even all of us, but fandom itself as a whole. Better people than me have said it, but it's incomparable. 
> 
> So if you will, imagine me ending this by singing loudly, and horribly, terribly off-key:  
> And I,  
> will always love youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu........


End file.
